Pablo Pica-SHING!
Picasso’s done it again. His 1941 portrait of his mistress, “Dora Maar with Cat” (she must have freaked when she saw it) sold for $95,216,000, including commission, at Sotheby’s on May 3. That makes him the clear money-leader in re-sales, his “Boy with a Pipe” having fetched $104 million two years ago, knocking off the reigning champ, poor old van Gogh, whose “Portrait of Dr Gachet” sold for $82.5 million in 1990.
Actually Maar probably loved Pablo’s painting of her – she was a surrealist photographer, and she hung out with the old goat for a decade.
The boys at Sotheby’s no doubt went out for a beer after the auction. They’d just raked in $207,564,800 from a slew of 20th-century pieces, including a new record for a Matisse ($18,496,000), plus Picasso’s “Harlequin with Baton” ($10,096,000) and “Woman Seated in an Armchair” ($6,736,000).
Much of this thanks to the US government telling Tyco chief Dennis Kozlowski that his Blackbeard the Pirate days were over and he’d have to sell of some of his art collection in payback. Gone, just like that: Monet’s “Near Monte-Carlo (Cape Martin: The Point)” for $5 million and Renoir’s “Flowers and fruit” for just over $2.8 million.
The day before, on May 2, it had been Christie’s turn to roll around on a fat bed of cash when Van Gogh made another of his stabs at the No 1 spot in New York. He outpointed Picasso again when his “L’Arlesienne, Madame Ginoux” from 1890 fetched a higher price than Pablito’s “Le Repos”, but it was a mere tickle at $40.3 million, and anyway the smelly Spaniard was barking at his heels at $34.7 million.
The painting in question is above on the left, but that’s the same lady on the right in Vincent’s more familiar “L’Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux”, painted later and now in the clutches of the Musée d’Orsay (no relation) in Paris, safe from the bids of rabid collectors.
She’s looking just as weary in both pictures, which is understandable because Marie Ginoux owned the Café de la Gare in Arles, where Van Gogh hung out and where he brought his frothy chum Gauguin when the crazy Tahitian came south for a visit. Van Gogh bragged to brother Theo that the portrait on the left was “slashed on in an hour”.
Interestingly, Christie’s expected (almost) the price they got for the Van Gogh, but Picasso’s “Repos” – a painting of yet another woman in his life, the Russian ballerina Olga “Mrs Picasso the third or fourth he thinks” Khokhlova – was only expected to snag about $20 million. And Pablo chipped in another $18.6 million the same evening when someone took a shine to his “Portrait de Germaine”.
Meanwhile, The Guardian’s favourite art critic Jonathan Jones weighed in last month on the ability of wealth and creativity to co-exist in living artists. The article’s quite good:
It is easier for a pickled shark to pass through the eye of a needle than for a multimillionaire to make good art. It’s just been revealed that Damien Hirst, at 40, is worth £100 million, a stupendous figure unrivalled by any artist his age, ever, even allowing for inflation and the changing nature of wealth.
Andy Warhol may have been worth $228 million when he died aged 59, but two decades earlier he was was spending money like water at his Factory studio. And although Salvador Dalí had already been nicknamed Avida Dollars in his 30s, his mysteriously vast fortune (the IRS never could quite fathom it) grew gradually. Hirst is richer than the two most notoriously money-obsessed modern artists at his age – will his decline be even more grotesque?
Warhol’s “Roll of Bills” from 1962
Dalí and Warhol both lost the spark of brilliance as money became central to their lives. At least in Warhol’s case there was a pertinence, even a kind of martyrdom, to his immersion in the dollar sign, the ultimate Pop icon. When you become as rich as this, being as rich as this becomes your story. If you don’t make art about being a multimillionaire, you are being dishonest. If you do, you can hardly claim the universality of great art.
The only chance for Hirst to avoid their fate is if he imitates old money. Artists were making vast fortunes centuries before Dalí came along, but they didn’t wear the money on the prongs of their moustache. They quietly invested it. Rubens is one of the most influential painters of landscape – and owned the land he depicted. He bought a country house, Het Steen, together with a title, Lord of Steen. His painting of Het Steen on an autumnal morning glows with his delight in success. Similarly, Claude Monet bought a house by the Seine where he created a water garden. His great water-lily paintings are the meditations of wealthy old age.
The most brilliant concealer of wealth was Picasso. From his 30s onwards, the modern master could afford the best studios and houses. But when we look at his painting of his studio on his Cannes estate we don’t think of him as rich in the same vulgar way as Dalí. This is because Picasso lived for work, and left it to his heirs to indulge the excesses and self-hatreds of the rich.
These artists proved you don’t have to starve to be a genius. And yet they never had to make sense of £100 million at Hirst’s age. Like Rubens, he has his country house, the 300-room Toddington Manor in Gloucestershire. But what would Van Gogh have done if you offered him Hirst’s money as he stood there in the cornfield, pistol cocked? I think he would have pulled the trigger that bit more firmly.
